My site's CSS is currently taken care of by Twitter Bootstrap, and it looks/works great at high resolutions such as the one of my 1920x1200 monitor. However, as soon as I go to a smaller device such as a smartphone, and even my very high resolution iPad 3, I notice all sorts of quirks that were simply not there on my computer screen. I can of course simulate them by resizing the browser window down horizontally.
The quirks are generally some form of random resizing (the images will resize before the header text) and eventually everything turning into one single big column, which is pretty much useless and inscrutable to anybody browsing the site.
How do I make the site look exactly the same on smaller screens? Look at apple.com and nest.com and you'll notice that they're both identical on any device you use to visit them.
I know it's Bootstrap trying to be more responsive/fluid, but I feel like that unless I spend a considerable effort fine-tuning that behavior for different horizontal resolutions, I'm much better off showing users the same version on any screen. Is there something I can turn off in Bootstrap that will prevent the smart stacking of spans and will preserve the same shape everywhere?
Thanks a lot!
Related
I am currently trying to build a personal profile page. It's a work in progress, and I know little HTML, but I'm getting there.
I'm having an issue with my webpage with regards to how it scales with changes of the browser window size. On my (quite wide) screen at university, it looks fine. However, reducing the browser window size manually - or simply viewing it in a full size browser window on a smaller screen - appears to mess everything up - it doesn't look very nice. Text goes close to my pictures, and it all looks a bit tatty.
I think this is probably because my design is quite poor.
1. Is it because my design is bad or is there something else I'm doing blatantly wrong?
My current idea for a solution is to resize things so that they would look more reasonable on a smaller screen (i.e. on a normal sized laptop). I'm worried that this might end up making things look a bit odd on a bigger screen, though.
2. Is it possible/within reason for a beginner to have two different designs, one for smaller screens and one for big screens, which could be detected and then utilised depending on what screen size viewer is using? Should my page be designed to simply work with whatever screen size?
3. If I do reorganize the page such that it works better with smaller
screens, is there a way to "lock" this design in place, so that it
doesn't get messed up if someone views my page in a wider window?
Perhaps a way to ensure that only the boundaries of the page increase
in width?
What I'm essentially asking is how I should go about designing my page in order to resolve the evident issue - where the issue is that it looks rubbish when the browser window is any smaller than the max size of my screen at university.
You've created your page using tables. It is not a good practise nowadays exactly due to the problems your are facing. In practise, tables should not be used for layout purposes.
To make your layout fluid it'd be better to develop using div with float and relative positioning.
You can see another discussion related to this topic here
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/6036/why-arent-we-supposed-to-use-table-in-a-design/6037
You could use css property #media, to handle different styles for different screen width: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_mediaquery.asp
I have started learning some web development lately and have noticed lot's of sites just use Pixel dimension to specify sizes of thins as well as the overall size of the body.
This seems counter intuitive to me (maybe because I am used to programing for Android)
But this could make the website a pain to view on lower res screens and less useful on higher end screens.
Is this really the way things are done? Does this not cause to much problems?
Thanks.
EDIT: how would one go about implementing a less fixed size site?
There are pros and cons to doing things like this.
Pros: It allows you to have full control over where everything is placed as sometimes with relative sizing things will move in unexpected ways.
Cons: Well you mentioned them! Different size screens will give the site a different look.
But overall to some people it is more important that everything remains in the right place than that everything looks great on all screen sizes. Ultimately it depends on the preference of the designer. Also remember that uses on higher resolution screens can zoom in and those on lower resolutions can zoom out!
Peaces and pears.
Each to their own, so long as they are consistant and know what they are doing that is all that matters.
I have recently starting using grid templating which uses pixel dimensions for containers and I really enjoy it. Considering that 960.gs (960px) is an accepted size width for a website, if you know that you do not want to develop a fluid template, then why not use fixed width pixels.
If I am going to have a mobile version of my phone, then I serve the mobile version not my 960px website, and in any case, most phones intuitively display websites anyway. (At least the latest phones, obviously not the old Nokia 8210's ;).
I am sure you have all come across this before but I just wondered if there were any new techniques out there.
I have been making a design for a client and they want everything 'above the fold' basically so that the pages fill the screen without scroll bars. I have explained that people look at web pages in browsers at different sizes and resolutions of different sizes etc etc, but this is what they want.
So I made a design that fit the viewport of Firefox at 1280 by 1024 which is the most common size.
Inevitable the client is now moaning that when they view this on their laptop screen 'the bottom gets cut off' so I change the design to fit 16x9, but then 'theres too much space at the bottom on the desktop now'...
I then stupidly showed them the ctrl+ zoom on Firefox, and they said, 'Thats exactly what I want, I dont want the layout or proportions on the site or text to change, I just want the whole thing to scale as it is to fill up the space'
I told them that I didn't think that was gonna happen, but I just thought I'd ask the community if they had any new answers to this unfortunately common request?
I think you're looking for a liquid layout
I'm making my first website, and I'm trying to make variable-sized buttons so they'll render correctly on low resolution (read: mobile) browsers. Currently I just have the usual rollover image solution (185 pixels wide by 37 tall if anybody cares), but when I preview the site in low resolution it looks, predictably enough, like complete crap (more specifically they don't have room so they arrange vertically instead of horizontally and take up a huge amount of screen real estate).
Semi-related, is there a way to overlay text on a button without saving separate images, each with the correct text? Just using a single template for buttons and then deciding what text goes on it as it's needed?
tl;dr: I'm trying to get a horizontal lineup of buttons for navigating my website, but I'm a noob and I can't do it right without your generous assistance.
You're picking a tough problem for your first website. Some issues you'll encounter:
There are a vast number of different mobile browsers out there (makes dealing with just Firefox, IE, Safair, Chrome trivial)
All these browsers have varying level of support for HTML. Some have poor support, they'll do different things with Tables.
A variety of screen sizes (although you can assume it will be one of 128, 176, 240, 320 or 480 px wide)
A difficulty in testing how your app looks on different browsers.
Varying support for java script (good on iPhone/Android/PalmPre, partial (and inconsistent) on BlackBerry/Sybian60 devices and poor on pretty much everything else)
A usual approach to these problems is to analyse the User Agent to identify the mobile browser type, and its capabilities. Then render the screen appropriately (e.g. for 128/176px wide screens, use small buttons). Look into http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ or http://deviceatlas.com/ for tools on how to do this. You may also find some useful info at http://mobiforge.com/forum/Developing. And http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN is a fine online analysis tool of your mobile website (but don't get sucked into trying to get a 100% score on it).
If you're just developing static HTML, then things are a lot more limited. You could use User Agent based URL rewrites on apache to redirect to different versions of your HTML.
Good luck!
Now that most of the major browsers support full page zoom (at present, the only notable exception being Google Chrome), are liquid or elastic layouts no longer needed? Is the relative pain of building liquid/elastic layouts worth the effort? Are there any situations where a liquid layout would still be of benefit? Is full page zoom the real solution it at first appears to be?
Yes, because there are a vast variety of screens out there commonly ranging from 15" to 32".
There is also some variation in what people consider a "comfortable" font size.
All of which adds up to quite a range of sizes that your content will need to fit into.
If anything, liquid layout is becoming even more necessary as we scale up to huge monitors, and down to cellphone devices.
Doing full page zoom in CSS isn't really worth it, especially as most browsers now do this kind of zooming natively (and do it much better - ref [img] tags).
As to using fixed width, there is a secondary feature with this... if you increase the font size, less words will be shown per line, which can help some people with reading.
As in, have you ever read a block of text which is extremely wide, and found that you have read the same line twice? If the line height was increased (same effect though font-size), with less words per line, this becomes less of an issue.
Yes, yes yes! Having to scroll horizontally on a site because some designer assumed the users always maximize their browsers is a huge pet peeve for me and I'm sure I'm not alone. On top of that, as someone with really crappy vision, let me say that full page zooming works best when the layout is liquid. Otherwise you end up with your nav bar off the (visible) screen.
I had a real world problem with this. The design called for a fixed width page within a nice border. Fitted within 800 pixels wide minus a few pixels for the browser window. Subtract 200 pixels for the left menu and the content area was about 600 pixels wide.
The problem was, part of the site content was dynamic, resulting in users editing and browsing data in tables, on their nice 1280x1024 screens, with tables restricted to 600 pixels wide.
You should allow for the width of the browser window in dynamic content, unless that dynamic content is going to be predominantly text.
Stretchy layouts are not so much about zooming as they are about wrapping - allowing a user to fit more information on screen if the screen is higher resolution while still making the content acessible for those with lower resolution screens. Page zooming does not achieve this.
i think liquid layouts are still needed, even though browsers have this full page zoom feature i bet a lot of people dont know about it or know how to use it.
Page zoom is horrible from an accessibility perspective. It's the equivalent of saying "we couldn't be bothered to design our pages properly [designers], so have a larger font and scroll the page horizontally [browser developers]". I cannot believe Firefox jumped off the cliff after Microsoft and made this the default.
Yes - you don't know what resolution the reader is using, or what size screen - or even if accessibility is required/used. As mentioned above, not everybody knows about full page zoom - I know about it, but hardly use it...
Only your own site's visitors can tell you if liquid layouts are still relevant for your site.
Using a framework such as the YUI-CSS and Google Website Optimizer it's pretty easy to see what your visitors prefer and lay aside opinion and instead rely on cold hard results.
Liquid layouts can cause usability problems, though.
Content containers that become too wide become exceptionally difficult to read.
Many blogs have fixed width content containers specifically for this reason.
Alternatively, you can create multi-column content containers so that you get an effect like a newspaper, with its multiple columns of thin containers of text. This can be difficult to do, though.